PHOTO: SRL MAYHEM. CREDIT/COPYRIGHT: Scott Beale/Laughing Squid; ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Mark Pauline and his dozen-odd, mostly male co-workers have stockpiled an arsenal in the machine shop where they live and work, on the outskirts of San Francisco’s Mission District. One device, the Low-Frequency Generator, is a mobile, radio-controlled, reaction jet engine, modeled after the V-1 […]
Newsflash: the June 2009 issue of The Brooklyn Rail includes “Love in the Time of Swine Flu,” my feature on David Lida, pegged on the softcover release of First Stop in the New World, his addictively readable book about Mexico City. Teaser: Now that the epidemic seems to have peaked, with a global body count […]
Believer, Beware: First-Person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith, is out, and a handsome thing it is. Edited by the redoubtable Jeff Sharlet and Peter Manseau (of Killing the Buddha fame), the collection anthologizes essays with curiosity-piquing titles such as “Jew Like Me,” “Zen Mind, Alkie Mind,” “Agnostic Front,” “I Was a Prepubescent Messiah,” “Banana […]
WHAT: “Nature Morte: Formaldehyde Photography and the New Grotesque,” a chapter from The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink (Grove/Atlantic: 1999) uploaded to the file-sharing site SCRIBD. Wax venus (Baroque obstetric mannequin) from La Specola, in Florence, Italy. Photo: Joanna Ebenstein; all rights reserved. For more of this sort of thing, see Ebenstein’s stunning […]
WHAT: “Nature Morte: Formaldehyde Photography and the New Grotesque,” a chapter from The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink (Grove/Atlantic: 1999) uploaded to the file-sharing site SCRIBD. Wax venus (Baroque obstetric mannequin) from La Specola, in Florence, Italy. Photo: Joanna Ebenstein; all rights reserved. For more of this sort of thing, see Ebenstein’s stunning […]
J.G. Ballard. Photo: Paul Murphy. All rights reserved. My review of J.G. Ballard’s nonfiction memoir Miracles of Life is out, in the L.A. Weekly. Read it here. “Nonfiction,” meaning: scrupulously factual, a distinction one makes in the wake of bogus confessionals such as James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces and Margaret B. Jones’s Love and […]
WHAT: Lecture at the School of Visual Arts, New York City. WHEN: Tuesday, February 3, 6:30 PM. WHERE: School of Visual Arts, Room 101C, 133 West 21st Street, Manhattan. WHAT, EXACTLY: A 45-minute lecture, with visuals, followed by the usual bloody scrum, on: “The Pathological Sublime: Beauty and Horror in the Age of Terror” The […]
Pardon my gratuitously exploitative title, but I had to grab you by the eyeballs somehow. Now that I’ve got your attention for what my Sitemeter informs will likely be 21 seconds at best (the Attention Economy is shriveling, here at Shovelware as elsewhere), let me tug on your sleeve about two new anthologies that feature […]
I’ve got a “reported opinion” piece on the Orphan Works Act—a radical overhaul of Copyright As We Know It, brought to you by the The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombie Legislators—in the December issue of the graphic-design magazine Print. Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford lawyer who launched the Creative Commons movement […]
This Saturday, in Tilburg, the Netherlands, I’ll be keynoting ZXZW, an arts festival devoted, this year, to Sun Ra and headlined, of course, by Sun Ra’s Arkestra. The Basics: “In a keynote speech Dery will examine the science-fictional (i.e., AfroFuturist) and techno-bricoleur aspects of Sun Ra’s work, setting them within the context of African-American culture’s […]